Voices in the Dark
by PasDeChat16
Summary: A nightmare and what follows.


Her husband's voice wakes her – the voice of another's dream calling her from her own.

"Jane!" In its desperation, his voice is stripped down to something like the wind that robs the darkness of its warm thickness, making the night open and unknown like its own hollow cries. "Jane!"

Her fingers brush his cheeks like raindrops. "Edward, wake," she pleads. "Wake, my darling."

His mind obeys what his eyes cannot. The thought that he is shut in darkness – that it is only in the horror of his dreams that he can see – is unbearable to her. She shifts closer, until they are lip to lip and heart to heart, and prays that in the warmth of her embrace he will find some trace of the moonlight she sees tumble through the window and cast itself about them like the lightest cloak, arming them in gauzy silver.

He hears her as if from a distance; his sleep is all color and pain and reality, but when he wakes he finds himself drowning, helpless in blackness like a fly caught in amber, and forced to watch as the golden beams that shimmer near the water's surface flicker and die as he sinks. Panicking, he reaches out, his hand moving frantically through barren air until she stills it in one of her own. She twines their fingers together, and he thinks that their clasped hands are a prayer.

He is weeping – she feels it in the trembling of his body. She holds him closer, allowing the sobs and tremors to pass from his body into hers. Her lips brush his face and tears cling to them. "Hush. Hush," she murmurs, but a sob splits her words, and she adds, frantic, "You _must_ speak. You _must_ tell me what is wrong. Please – you must!"

His hand tightens on hers. "It was the same," he says at last, and though his voice is taut and focused, she hears anguish in the breath of air he expels with the words. "It is the same each night. You leave me, and I know it is God's punishment, and just, but still I rail against it. I see you suffer – as I know you must have, when you fled my wretched threats and pleas – but I cannot help you. I struggle, but as it is in dreams, my will is decimated in my actions. I try to move, but my limbs are heavy and alien, as though they belonged to – obeyed – someone other than myself. I take a step at last, and find that you have flown a mile in the interim. And then the walls of fire rise up about me...and I am lost."

She caresses him, her hands skimming the harsh contours of his face. "Don't stop," he whispers; the dream has left him feeling adrift and ill-defined, and it is only her touch that can reclaim him from that hazy world as she traces the lines that mark his presence in reality, finding and confirming them with gentle love. Her palm fits over the burn that mars his cheek, its whorl-like pattern suggestive of some hideous starburst that has broken through the surface of his skin. With her hand against it, though, the mark seems not quite so horrible. It no longer engenders in him the same revulsion at its unnaturalness – unnaturalness all the more terrifying because it is a part of him. Her fingers draw off pain, leaving a scar that can rest quietly – only one of many features.

She lets her tears fall on his face and trail off into his hair, hoping that he realizes this sadness is an echo of her love for him.

But then he says, "Forgive me," and she hears pain in the dark hollows of his voice – uncontrollable pain that overflows, fracturing his words almost beyond recognition. "I caused you pain," he cries, "I cause you pain even now."

She shakes her head. "Whatever pain you caused is long past and forgiven. My only pain now is that I cannot ease yours."

"Oh, Jane," he murmurs. "You ease it. At times, though –" he hesitates, and the despairing fear in his voice and his hand as it passes nervously across his face is that of a child – the kind of stifling terror she felt in the dark nights at Lowood, when, in the absence of any confidante to absolve her of her anxieties, those feelings had slowly worn away at her, hollowing her from he inside out. He continues, because he has his confidante beside him, and in the rushed flutter of his words, she hears the shame and doubt of a confession. "At times," he says, "I fear the pain will prove to great even for you. I fear – I do not want you to be caught up – swept away – in its torrent. I don't wish…I cannot ask you to make such a sacrifice."

"Oh, Edward," she whispers sorrowfully, but quickly gathers up her sadness and folds it away, allowing a smile to blossom shyly on her face as she teases, "I had hoped you might think more of my abilities. You once figured me as your very hope of Heaven, and now you doubt that I can chase away a nightmare? Well, I warned you that such idolatry would burn itself out – now I see what poor esteem is left."

It is too soon to hope for laughter; she knows this and is content when he smiles wanly and replies, "Forgive my lapse of faith, my dear." His voice sheds its flippancy as he continues in a tone so gentle and grateful it calls forth her tears once more, "Truly, I could not forget your strength and courage. Nor your compassion."

She drops a kiss on his lips for his trust, because in truth, there are times she feels her own hope draining away in the face of his suffering. But she is sure that his belief in her power to heal him does more for him than her own inadequate abilities ever could. She embraces the flights of hyperbole she once discouraged in him; if it brings him real comfort to think her his angel, she is glad of it – he has known too little comfort in his life. In the darkness of the night, stripped of all the casual, tangible reminders of their new life that daylight illuminated, and surrounded instead by a blankness that seemed to shelter and give birth to haunted memories and imaginings, they hide themselves in a cocoon of fairy tales. Their world, she knows, might to another seem insubstantial; they believe in the stories they told with the passionate conviction of children, but never forget the fears they worked so desperately to mask. But she also knows that childhood fancies have a truth of their own that takes root and lingers into adulthood, at the very heart of one's nature, and she trusts that one day, they will wake to find that their feigned hope and faith have pushed aside all fear. So she draws him nearer, and hey hold each other through the night.


End file.
